


"Complications"

by stillscape



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-23
Updated: 2013-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-12 17:06:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six times Ben tells Leslie she's beautiful, a.k.a. straight-up, largely unapologetic fluff. Spans "Road Trip" to "Partridge." Written for trope bingo over at the leslie_ben livejournal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Complications"

***

 

She wakes up when a familiar hand grabs her shoulder.

“Leslie?”

“What is it, honey?” Sitting upright, she scrambles to find the switch on the unfamiliar bedside lamp. Motel lamps never make any sense, that’s the problem; she can’t remember whether she’s supposed to push something in or find a little disc or—nope, there it is, a button at the lamp’s base. “Are you all right?”

Ben’s squinting at her, rubbing his eyes, the weird dopey grin back on his face.

“Leslie,” he says, raising an eyebrow, “my penis doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Okay,” she says, placing a hand on top of his. “That’s good.”

He nods. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

She’s about to remind him that there’s a _reason_ for that, but before she can get the words _You’re on morphine, honey_ out—

“Whoa,” he says, softly, taking in the motel room’s hideous wallpaper. “Did Steph redecorate while I was in the hospital?”

“No, we left Partridge. We’re in a motel in Wisconsin. Do you not remember stopping?”

Ben shakes his head, which apparently isn’t a good idea, because—though he’s already lying down—he wobbles so dangerously that Leslie instinctively throws out an arm to steady him.

“It’s so _colorful_ ,” he says, with a touch of awe.

“The whole room’s beige, honey.” Leslie takes a good look at her husband. Aside from the wobbling, and the dopey grin, and the fact that his t-shirt’s on backwards, he looks relatively normal.

Until he throws her a peace sign, bobs his head a few times, and declares the motel room “groovy.”

So Leslie’s kidding herself about the normal part, probably. “Let’s go back to sleep, okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees.

“Night, honey.” She reaches over and turns out the light, but Ben yelps almost at once. Startled, she switches the light back on. “What was that?”

“You went away.”

“No, I’m still here,” she sighs, feeling her heartbeat return to normal speed. “I just made it dark.”

“Leslie, I know how lights work.” Ben reaches out, stroking her cheek with a thumb in a way that’s simultaneously dopey and endearing. “If you turn them out, I can’t see how pretty you are.”

“All right,” she says, smiling a little in spite of herself. “Come here.” She extends an arm, and Ben eagerly snuggles in next to her, pressing against her side, one hand settling conveniently on her boob.

Well, fine. That’s fine.

Everything’s fine, even when he starts squeezing it a little. Sure, she’ll never actually fall asleep that way, but…it does feel good.

“Leslie?” he whispers, a few moments later. “Leslie, my penis really doesn’t hurt.”

“Okay.” It must not. She can feel it pretty well against her thigh, and all indications are that it’s back to normal.

“So we can use it,” Ben announces, rather proudly.

“Don’t you think we should give it another day? Ben shook his head against her. “I don’t want to—to keep it from—anyway, you’re on drugs.”

“Yeah, but my _penis_ isn’t on drugs.”

“Your penis very much is on drugs,” she counters. This immediately strikes her as one of the more preposterous sentences she’s ever uttered.

Ben lets go of her boob, rolls over, and reaches back to grab her wrist, positioning her hand right on—

“My butt is like ninety-five percent sure that my penis is going to work just fine.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” she mutters, trying to ignore the warmth that’s now building slowly in the pit of her stomach.

“Why are you fighting the rainbow? It’s all beautiful. We should find a pot of gold, Leslie. _The_ pot of gold. You know?”

“Okay.” She lets the word slip out, meaning for it to steady both of them, but Ben takes it as permission to start tugging her pajama bottoms off. “Okay, honey, no. Seriously, no, not now—”

But he’s hovering above her now, impressively stable on all fours and focused, focused entirely on her, like he always is in these situations.

“Leslie Knope,” he says, the words slow and distinct, “I am one hundred percent sure that you are the best wife in the world. And I am—” He screws up one eye in concentration— “I am eighty-eight percent sure that my penis is ninety-six-point-eight fully operational—”

“Are you talking in percentages to seduce me?”

Ben nods fervently, and Leslie cringes, bracing herself—but he seems secure.

“And if my penis is not fully operational, then I am a hundred and twenty percent sure that I’ll do everything else I can to make you feel good anyway.”

It’s entirely unfair for him to use the campaign manager voice at a time like this, when she’s very rationally trying to avoid long-term penis damage.

If he thinks he can do other things, though… well, that might be worth exploring at least a little bit.

“Ben…”

He pokes her in the chest and then looks at his right wrist. “I’m only going to be loopy for another hour,” he announces. “Roll over, okay?”

“Roll over?”

He nods. “You’re my beautiful snuggybug, and you had a really stressful trip, and I’m going to give you a back massage for the next hour—” he taps his wrist again—“until I’m not weird and you believe me when I say my penis is normal, Leslie Knope.”

Leslie looks up at this person to whom she’s married, this person who is—if nothing else—impressively devoted to making her happy.

He is absolutely not wearing a watch right now.

And he’s unshaven and his hair looks like he combed it with an eggbeater and he’s trying a combination of faces on her, switching between pleading puppy dog eyes and his no-nonsense expression, neither of which is coming out quite right.

“Well,” she says, giving his thigh a squeeze, “I guess I can’t say no to an hour-long back rub.”

That earns her the dopey grin again. “I love you, snuggy buggles.”

Yeah, he’s still pretty doped up.

“Love you too.”

***

The morning after her trial, Leslie awakes to a thin stream of weak winter sunlight peeking in through a gap in her curtains.

For a moment, she contemplates slipping out of bed for a better look at her yard. Snow had been falling pretty hard when they went to bed last night, and she hopes it continued to fall; hopes that everything outside is covered in a soft white blanket, that little ice crystals formed in the corners of the window, that she has enough dry firewood in the garage to last for a whole day of cuddling on the couch with hot chocolate.

Outside in the real world, she suspects, she’s going to have forty-five voicemails from her advisers, and twelve from the media, and a bursting email inbox. The _Pawnee Sun_ might even have someone stationed in her front yard right now—thank goodness her bedroom opens to the backyard. Outside, the real version of outside, is going to be pretty terrible for both of them today. It might also be terrible tomorrow, and maybe even the day after that, too.

But a good, thick, pristine layer of snow would cushion those blows. It would be an excuse for hot chocolate and a warm fire and cuddling on the couch. It would almost be like living in a snow globe for one day, a perfect impenetrable bubble holding only her and Ben.

Leslie takes a single deep breath and exhales slowly. Even though she doesn’t know for sure that today is a snow globe day, the possibility exists. For now, that’s enough.

And then all of a sudden, her familiar sense of impatience kicks in. She has to know now whether or not her winter wonderland exists, but she doesn’t want to open the curtains alone; she wants Ben standing next to her, one arm around her shoulders while they draw the curtains open. Together. It’s a silly image, of course, but it’s what she wants.

She rolls over, insinuating her nose between Ben’s and the pillow, and kisses him softly until he wakes up enough to start kissing her back. Leslie closes her eyes and goes with it, letting him roll her onto her back, making mental notes so she’ll remember exactly how every shift in body weight affects her mattress, how Ben’s fingers feel as they slip onto the nape of her neck.

Leslie doesn’t open her eyes again until she feels Ben push up and back. Her heart thumps a few times at the sight of him, hovering over her, just far enough away for his face to be comfortably in focus. He’s tousled and unshaven and—her heart thumps again—so clearly in love with her right now that she can’t help but beam at him, and trust that she looks the same way.

“Morning, beautiful,” he says.

“Hi, handsome.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

They don’t leave the bed for a while longer, and when they do finally stand in front of the window and wrestle the curtains open, they find a grey sky hanging over an inch of half-melted slush, topped with muddy raccoon footprints, instead of a backyard winter wonderland.

She sighs herself against Ben’s chest. “I was hoping there would be more snow.”

“This isn’t great,” he agrees.

But they stand at the window for a few moments longer, and like magic, new flakes start drifting from the sky.

Even if they don’t stick, Leslie thinks, today will still be a snow globe kind of day.

***

“This park is perfect,” Ben says. “I’m…really glad we built it.”

She feels stable enough, finally, to give him a little kiss on the jaw. It’s something she almost never used to do, mostly because she was always too impatient to get to his lips—but now she’s trying not to think too hard, and so she’s going for the closest part of his face. On the way there she realizes it feels like she’s about to whisper a secret into his ear, and maybe she’s about to, maybe she’s about to tell him she loves him, except no she’s not, she’s done being a steamroller.

Ben solves her problem by turning his head slightly, catching her lips in a slow, quiet kiss.

This prevents her from speaking, which is probably for the best. It doesn’t prevent yet another tear from welling up in the corner of her eye.

“God, I’ve got to stop crying,” she mutters, but this tear feels like a happy one, so she lets it stay until it grows big enough to spill. Ben wipes this one away, the pad of his thumb swiping gently over her cheekbone. In the wake of his touch, she feels the sting of cold air on her damp cheek.

At some point, they’re going to have to leave this park. _Their_ park. _We built it_ , Ben had said.

She snuggles back under his arm, resting her head somewhere between his shoulder and his chest. The park is so small it feels like being in a private bubble, even though she knows perfectly well that the park is in fact so small it’s not private at all; anyone can see anything. At the moment, she doesn’t care. She just cares about breathing, breathing and the weight of Ben’s arm, heavy and still against her shoulders.

“I never took our picture down,” he confesses.

Picture. “You have a picture of us?”

“April took it at the Harvest Festival. I kind of stole it from her right before we broke up. And I put it on the corkboard in my bedroom. I never took it down.”

“What were we doing?”

“Standing in front of Li’l Sebastian’s pen. It was on the second or third day of the Festival, I think. You’re wearing a bright pink blouse.”

Leslie, who has no idea where this story is going, moves her hand to Ben’s leg and gives it a little squeeze.

“There are a bunch of kids around us, and Li’l Sebastian, and everyone’s having a great time—I mean, it’s hard to tell with a horse, but—”

“He had a great time at the Harvest Festival,” she says. The day’s coming back to her, faintly.

Ben buries a kiss on the top of her head, and then sighs into her hair. “It’s like—this is going to sound stupid, but it’s like everything that makes you Leslie Knope, all in one picture. You made that whole thing happen—”

“No.” The correction comes automatically, even as her brain gets stuck on the way Ben says her name, makes _Leslie Knope_ sound like the best possible thing to be. “ _We_ made it happen.”

“Well, you started it.”

“I did,” she admits, letting the corners of her mouth curl up just a tiny bit. “But I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“And you helped a lot of people along the way—all of Pawnee, in fact—and you know I was pretty crazy about you by the end of it, right?”

She nods into his coat, remembering the sense of awe she’d felt the first time Ben had confessed just how long he’d had feelings for her.

“It just seemed like everything was right there, right in that picture.” Ben moves his free hand from the back of the bench to his own leg, where her hand still rests, and laces their fingers together. “And then on top of that, it’s just a ridiculously good picture of you. I mean—” He swallows. “I remember thinking that on the day, too, that you were so—you know? I really wanted to just—hide in the middle of the corn maze with you, or something, like we were teenagers.”

“Ben…”

“And I couldn’t take the damn picture down. I’ve been looking at it every single day.”

She’s done being a steamroller, so she’s not going to tell him she loves him. Not yet. Not now.

“I missed you _so much_ ,” he says, voice cracking, and really, it’s all he needs to say.

“I missed you too.”

Tomorrow morning, she’ll care about the consequences. But not tonight.

Leslie pulls herself upright, feeling stiff and sore after so many minutes on an iron bench in the cold.

“Let’s go,” she says, not knowing if she means to her house or Ben’s, or whether it matters where they go, just so long as they go there together.

***

“I’m Leslie Knope,” she murmurs, quietly but clearly. Leslie Knope doesn’t mumble or stutter or slur, not even at two in the morning when she’s talking into a faded blue pillowcase in her sleep.

Ben isn’t asleep. He hasn’t been sleeping very much lately—not because he can’t, but because he doesn’t want to. There are only so many more nights he’s going to get with her, and sleeping through them seems like a waste. Better to be awake as much as possible, and to stockpile as many intimate memories as he can, so he’ll have something to hold on to after they’ve broken up.

The breakup that he’s going to have to initiate, because Leslie doesn’t seem to be able to do it.

It’s entirely likely that this idea will backfire, he knows. That he’ll wind up lying awake through future lonely nights while Leslie, sound asleep in bed without him, rehearses increasingly eloquent speeches. But he hasn’t thought of an alternative yet; hasn’t come up with a better way to maybe, just maybe, keep himself grateful for the brief time he got with Leslie rather than resentful that it had to end.

Well. Their situation was always too complicated for it not to be doomed in one way or another.

He’s been having the same thought cycle for weeks now, and it always spirals in exactly the same way. At the center of the spiral, at the end of the thread, is an empty city council seat and Leslie’s portrait on the wall and the buttons he’s had in his car for however many days now.

Not for the first time, Ben wonders what would happen if he shook Leslie awake right now and told her that he’s in love with her—probably more crying. The éclair hadn’t had quite the effect he’d been going for.

The last thing he wants to do is make her cry again.

“The male-dominated workforce in our local government is a huge bugaboo,” she says. “Of course _engendering_ employment opportunities for women would be a very high priority for me.”

Good lord.

“Leslie,” he whispers, but she doesn’t react. She remains curled on her side, with her back to him and her shoulders rounded, a messy pile of blankets rising and falling with each breath.

He’s in way too deep, he knows that, but how the hell can anyone _not_ be in love with a woman who uses the word “bugaboo” and makes bad puns in her sleep? Who’s trying to solve gender inequality while she’s not even conscious?

The fact that he’s never once heard Leslie try to solve their relationship dilemma in her sleep—that she can’t even bring herself to tell him what he already knows—seems awfully significant.

Gently, Ben smoothes a few unraveled curls back, exposing the delicate patch of skin between her ear and her neck, and it’s there that he lets his lips graze her, silently mouthing the words he can’t say. First he tells her _Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?_ and then _Leslie Barbara Knope, you are the best person I know_ and _I’m in love with you_ and finally _And we have to break up_.

Leslie doesn’t stir.

In the morning, when she stands at her bedroom window and throws the curtains back, she shivers, even though it’s not the slightest bit cold.

“Want pancakes?” There’s a tiny manic note in her voice, he’s sure of it. “I think I’m going to make pancakes this morning.”

“Sure,” he says.

“Okay. And bacon. So. Ben, you shower and get ready, and I’ll make pancakes, and—okay, I’m going downstairs now.”

“Okay.”

When he gets downstairs twenty minutes later, showered and shaved, there aren’t any pancakes yet. There’s only Leslie, holding a bowl of batter and staring at her electric griddle like she can’t quite figure out how to turn it on.

***

“Okay, Ann’s going to give us an hour,” Leslie says, locking the door behind her. “And Stuart?”

“Stuart is in a meeting on the fourth floor until three.” Ben feels a tiny twinge of guilt over scheduling said largely unnecessary meeting—a twinge that’s immediately alleviated when he receives one Leslie Knope in his lap, padfolio and all. “Hi.”

“Hi yourself.” She leans over to kiss him.

“What’s today’s agenda?”

Leslie looks to the left, to the right, then grins and points to her chest instead of opening the padfolio.

“All right,” Ben says at once. He’s not going to disagree with _that_ agenda.

“No, no, look in there.”

He peeks down Leslie’s entirely-appropriate-for-work v-neck. “You put an agenda in your _bra_?” It looks…painful, actually, to have a big folded sheet of paper with sharp corners poking into that particular area of soft skin. But the idea is sexy. The idea is undeniably sexy.

“Mm-hmm.” She pulls out the agenda and smoothes it across Ann’s desk, which gives Ben an opportunity to sneak a quick kiss in the v-neck area.

“So,” she says, businesslike, “five minutes for making out, forty-five for work, five more for making out, then five for work at the end, in case Ann comes back early. Sound good?”

“Sounds good. Um…” Ben clears his throat. “Do I get to, you know...I mean, you put the agenda in there for a reason, right?”

Leslie nods. “You already started.”

“True.”

“So how would you rank that one?”

“On a scale of one to ten, definitely a ten.”

“Ben,” she says, huffing a little (but she’s not really upset and she knows he knows that), “I can’t keep upping the ante, you know.”

“Yeah, but you’re objectively really sexy, so by default, everything you do—”

She shuts him up for exactly five minutes.

***

The first word out of Leslie’s mouth is not one he wanted to hear.

“Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh?” he echoes.

Leslie nods, her eyes bright and round and locked on his. “Uh-oh,” she says, a second time. Her voice remains soft, and that has to be a good sign, a sign he’s going to clutch onto because good lord, he can’t imagine—doesn’t _want_ to imagine—how he’ll feel if he never gets to kiss Leslie Knope again.

“Do you want to sit down and talk?” he asks, jerking his head towards his desk.

Wordlessly, Leslie steps into the room and sits in the chair across from his desk, bouncing her heels up and down on the floor. He follows her, pulling the door shut behind him.

As he sits in his own chair, Ben fully comprehends two things for the first time: one, he just kissed Leslie Knope (and she kissed him back) and two, he somehow forgot to think about what would happen next.

“Okay,” Leslie says. “Let’s talk about this.” Her voice is a little stronger than it had been in the hallway, her vision a little more focused. She’s obviously thinking, brain going a million miles a minute like it always does, and the sight is—as always—enough to make his heart race.

“Okay.”

“You go first.”

Ben swallows hard and wipes his palms on his pants. This feels like such a familiar situation, him on one side of some piece of furniture and Leslie on the other. It’s a seating arrangement they’ve played out across desks in his office and in hers, across conference room tables in budget task force meetings and wobbly folding tables in Harvest Festival workspaces, and god, he just wants to be on the _same_ side of the table as Leslie. Not figuratively, but literally (he cringes, inwardly, at the Chris-word), so they can hold hands underneath.

“I don’t—Leslie, I don’t have a whole lot to say here,” he starts, though that’s not exactly true; he has a George R.R. Martin-sized volume of things to say to Leslie, under the right circumstances. Circumstances in which it’s not going to sound as though he’s trying to coerce her into doing anything she doesn’t want to do. “I’m sorry if that was an unpleasant surprise just now—”

“It wasn’t unpleasant.”

“I already told you how I feel. That hasn’t changed. I don’t think it’s going to change. And I know this is a huge risk, but I also think you know it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

Leslie, who’s been biting her lip since she spoke, doesn’t move otherwise.

“So I guess—” His voice cracks slightly. “I guess the ball’s in your court now.”

She takes a deep breath and asks, “Where is this going to go?” It is, unfortunately, a very logical question.

“I don’t know.” Ben looks across his desk at her, and for all that Leslie usually fidgets, right now she’s still and calm. “We would have to figure that out at some point.”

“But it might not go anywhere.”

“It might not.” If it doesn’t—he allows himself one moment of wild melodrama—if it doesn’t, he’ll join one of those weird monk communities he audited six years ago.

“But you hope it will.”

“Well, obviously I do, I—Leslie, I just told you I’m willing to risk my job over this.”

“Both our jobs.”

He sighs. “Technically, yes, but—”

“But you’re the supervisor, so you’d be disciplined more harshly.”

So at least they’re close to being on the same wavelength. It’s simultaneously the best and most frustrating thing in the world—he and Leslie seem to be so in sync so much of the time, and yet…

“And I think there’s more that you’re not telling me.”

“I don’t. I mean, I do, but it’s not—Leslie, not now.” Ben licks his lips and then becomes aware that that particular gesture could be drastically misinterpreted. “You already know. I mean, I think you do.”

She thinks on that for a few moments.

“Well,” she says, drawing another deep breath, “we should talk logistics, then.”

“Logistics?”

“How we’re going to sneak around.”

All the air rushes out of the room. Or maybe more air rushes into it. Either way, he’s lightheaded. “You definitely want to do that?”

“I…yes. I think so. I don’t know, I—Ben, twenty minutes ago I was talking to myself in the conference room—like, out loud—trying to convince myself that this wasn’t worth the risk.”

“Leslie, I don’t want to—”

She meets his eyes and smiles, a slightly more confident version of the look he got at the restaurant in Indy. “But now I think it is. I mean, it might be. It’s going to be complicated, but, I mean—we have to try, right?”

Never has Ben hated a piece of furniture more than he hates his desk right now, a big solid chunk of wood and metal for which he is also profoundly grateful, even if he hates it, because it’s between him and Leslie and he really shouldn’t kiss her in his office again, no matter how much he wants to do it.

They both sit there for a moment, smiling at each other, until Ben dimly becomes aware that they’re somehow holding hands across the desk. Judging by the warmth of their clasp, they may have been holding hands for quite some time. It’s not all that comfortable—too much elbow pressure—but he’ll take it.

“So can I—can I take you out somewhere tonight?” And this time, he thinks, Chris will have no idea where they are.

Leslie doesn’t answer.

“Leslie?”

“What was it you thought I knew?”

“Oh.” Somehow, after all that’s been said, the words that could easily be empty are the hardest ones to say. “Just, you know, I think you’re overwhelmingly attractive, and…” He trails off. Good lord, he’s this old and he can’t tell Leslie she’s beautiful without grinning at her like some nervous teenage boy who’s never gone past second base? It’s like being in Ann’s living room all over again. Ask Leslie to prom, indeed.

But Leslie is, as always, Leslie.

“Oh, well, yeah. I did know that. Wait, _overwhelmingly_?” There’s a little note of teasing in her voice, and that’s what finally makes Ben snap, makes him spring from the chair and skirt the desk and kiss Leslie a second time, right there in his office where anyone could see.

Overwhelmingly, indeed.


End file.
